At Fortissimo, Winterbottom’s Latest to Star Firth, Sturgess

At Fortissimo, Winterbottom's Latest to Star Firth, Sturgess

A new political thriller from Michael Winterbottom, set in British ruled Palestine at the end of World War II, will star Colin Firth, Jim Sturgess and Matthew Macfadyen. The project, “The Promised Land” (produced by Revolution Films’ Andrew Eaton), is being sold worldwide by Fortissimo Films at the European Film Market that is running alongside the Berlin International Film Festival in Germany.

Winterbottom’s latest, “The Killer Inside Me”, is screening in competition here at the Berlinale after debuting at the Sundance Film Festival last month (it landed with IFC Films for North American distribution during the fest).

“The Promised Land,” written by Winterbottom and Laurence Coriat, will shoot this Summer and be completed next year, Fortissimo said, in an announcement.

“This is one of the most gripping and powerful scripts I have read in a long time,” said Fortissimo’s Michael Werner, in a statement today. “‘The Promised Land’ is sure to excite passions on all sides of the story. There is no director better equipped to tackle this complex and moving period of history than Michael Winterbottom, who has proved time and again his skill at tackling troubling and controversial human stories.”

In the words of a synopsis from Fortissimo: “‘The Promised Land’ is a police-thriller set in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem during the British Mandate era in Palestine. It tells the gripping true story of two British police officers Thomas Wilkin, played by Jim Sturgess, and Geoffrey Morton, played by Matthew Macfadyen and their battle to bring to an end the campaign of bombings and assassinations by the extreme right-wing Jewish underground led by the charismatic poet, Avraham Stern. The film culminates when the two policemen track Stern down to his apartment hide-out in Tel Aviv on Mizrachi Street in 1942.”

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